INSECT CONTROL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20101, 18 May 1927, Page 7

INSECT CONTROL

VALUABLE SERVICE BY BATS. Bats were recently revealed, according to the San Franciso Tribune, not as hideous things that form themes for murder mysteries or that cling in women’s hair and have to be cut out, but as the greatest friends -he farmer has in the animal kingdom. This new view of the weird nocturnal creature is taken by Dr Joseph Grinncll, director of the University of California Museum of vertebrate zoology, who calls bats “the night shift of insect control.” While the rest of the world is asleep, the bats fly out over the crops, eating r.odlin moths and other insects which destroy the farmer’s profits, Dr Grinncll declares. Every one of the 33 different varieties of bats in California is insectivorous, Dr Grinncll has found, and the little animals earn their right to live in their nightly search for food. Hopes raised some time ago that bats might prove useful as destroyers of mosquitoes were proveiT groundless by Dr Grinncll, who found that a mouthful of “anopheles” docs not constitute the bat’s idea of a square meal. People who have been annoyed with colonies of bats “roosting” in their barns or attics arc advised by Dr Grinncll not to kill the unwelcome tenants, but to board up all entrances while the bats are out hunting at night. Highland laments, mostly dating from tho sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were recorded for tho gramohpone for the first, time in history in London recently. Hie aim were played by Pipe-major John MacDonald, of Inverness, who, at 54 years of ago, is tho most famous piper in tho Highlands. Ills visit to London was arranged by the Pibroch Society, of which Lord Lovat is president. Four Boston terriers, the first to lie imported into England, have been taken over from Canada for tho purpose of exhibition and breeding, and are consigned to a London dealer, who had paid £lobo for tho four. Tho Boston lerrior which is described as a cross between tho old English bulldog and the hull terrier, has a square noso, a email “moustache.” small feet, a bobbed tail, and is about 24in in height.